The task of moving enterprise applications to the cloud usually doesn't cause too many headaches, but facilitating quick and secure communication across distributed apps and network components is a different story.

IBM's Andrew Coward, who serves as GM of software-defined networking, told SDxCentral that customers are asking for help in managing the complexity of cloud networking, and he pointed to the differences between various cloud providers' environments as one main culprit. "Connecting those dots together became really complicated," he said.

Another main message Coward hears from enterprises is that after they move applications to the cloud, "things break, and we don't know why."

IBM's answer to that seems simple: data. "No application is an island," he said. When an app moves to the cloud, it needs to talk to a variety of destinations – including users, back-end databases in a private cloud or a single sign-on system, for example. And "if any one of those have networking connection issues, that's a problem," he explained.

Another contributing factor to application networking challenges is the disconnect between DevOps and CloudOps teams. In IBM's efforts to bridge that gap, the vendor touts its hybrid cloud mesh software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering as a way to remove the need for months-long CloudOps approvals following app development.

The mesh service aims to use automation to "give the DevOps team what they want and give the CloudOps team the rules," Coward said. DevOps teams can "go build themselves a global network that lives in the cloud," but "all along they're working to a rule set that the CloudOps teams have devised," he explained. And this all happens "natively as part of the CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous deliver] process," a feature IBM claims "is very, very unique."

Specifically, cloud operations teams build a virtual global network as underlying infrastructure. And unlike the networks of decades past, "this is something you accomplish in a couple of hours," he noted.

Next, DevOps teams are able to connect applications, load balancers, databases, web front-ends and any other network components using a drag-and-drop interface. "Behind the curtains ... the network side [is] busy building tunnels and connectivity and making sure that's all secure, and that they've followed the principles the CloudOps teams have built," he explained.

One way to describe the vendor's overarching strategy with its hybrid cloud mesh is "cloud out," Coward said. "We've built this technology between the clouds, and we're reaching out to the edge of the network points."

IBM credits the offering's differentiation to the vendor's focus on common workflows and "how people do their jobs," he added. After spending time with both cloud and dev operations teams to learn "their experience and where their pain points are," the hybrid cloud mesh enables even networking newbies to connect applications. "We've taken [the process] down to three or four steps – that might be dozens of steps in our competitors'" offerings, he noted.

The hybrid cloud mesh is currently available in early access.